Monk

Madonna brought her eye-popping MDNA Tour to L.A.'s Staples Center on Wednesday night, where she dedicated a song to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani child activist shot in the head and neck on Tuesday by a masked member of the Taliban.

Dressed in a leather skirt and black beret, the music icon took a break from the evening's theatrics to tell the sold-out crowd of 18,000 that it was time "to have our serious chat."

"This made me cry," Madonna said. "The 14-year-old schoolgirl who wote a blog about going to school. The Taliban stopped her bus and shot her. Do you realize how sick that is?"

"Support education! Support women!" she shouted, to the crowd's cheers of approval.

Yousafzai, one of the most outspoken and influential advocates for girls' rights to education in the Middle East, remains unconscious in a hospital since the shooting. Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said of the assassination attempt, "Let this be a lesson," and pledged that the Taliban would try again to kill her should she survive her injuries.

-- ONTD

Nicholas Kristof also has an account of the Islamist assault on girls' education.

( Read more... )

“The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.”

-- Jennifer Homans at The New York Times

Thus begins what I am glad to say is a rather negative book review. I also think of Naomi Wolf's new release, "Vagina", in which Ms. Wolf celebrates the goddessness of women. In the light of all this feminist consciousness-raising, one can get the idea that men are just freeloading rapists-in-potential, neanderthals clumsily smashing things as we stumble around in this exalted feminine civilaztion.

Ms. Homans notes that Rosin's argument rests on how well women have been doing in the 'new economy', but the economy has a way of changing again and again, and what seems promising today can become tomorrow's bitter illusion. As Ms. Homans concludes her piece:

And I can’t share Rosin’s rosy faith in the global economy. Revolutions, economic or otherwise, have a way of disappointing women. They tear down the old, women step in and make strides, and as a new order sets in the strides disappear. Are Rosin’s Plastic Women genuine victors, or are they — or will they become — unwitting victims? Will the women who are so diligently training themselves as pharmacists today be as flexible and confident when the winds of the feckless global economy turn against them? How flexible can a woman be when she has been training for something for years and suddenly it is blown off the map by the “new” economy? Ask the men who are ended.

When it comes to revolutionary talk, I liked it better when people were focusing on the 1% versus the 99%, about trying to get at that obscene wealth that is being hoarded at the very tippy top of our human hierarchy and trying to make life fairer and more decent for the rest of us, but I guess some revolutions are not meant to be, just as I suspect that it will always be men at the very top and in charge.

Naomi Wolf apparently has made another daring foray into feminist theory with a new book, "Vagina: A New Biography". A promising title, though I might change a word. After reading some of the quotes from the book, however, I was left wondering if this was a joke, and I am yet unresolved on this critical point. Joke or not, we shall keep a few of these delightful points for our own edification or amusement, depending on your perspective and mood.


_ _ _

2.Your vagina makes you a goddess. Or rather, "The Goddess."
"Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, 'the Goddess.' [...] I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real."

3.Foreplay is called "the Goddess Array."
"The autonomic nervous system prepares the way for the neural impulses that will travel from vagina, clitoris, and labia to the brain, and this fascinating system regulates a woman's responses to the relaxation and stimulation provided by 'the Goddess Array,' the set of behaviors a lover uses to arouse his or her partner."

4.The vagina can control the mind.
"Once one understands what scientists at the most advanced laboratories and clinics around the world are confirming — that the vagina and the brain are essentially one network, or 'one whole system,' as they tend to put it, and that the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence — the answers to many of these seeming mysteries fall into place."

5.The vagina evolved to help women reach nirvana.
"The mystical or transcendental potential of female sexuality [...] allows women to connect often, and in a unique way, even if just for brief moments, with experiences of a shining, 'divine,' or greater self (or nonself, as Buddhists would say) or with a sense of the connection among all things. Producing the stimulation necessary for these mind-states is part of the evolutionary task of the vagina."

6.Uteruses can think.
"I experienced some of the 'thoughts' of the uterus myself."

-- Naomi Wolf, "Vagina: A New Biography"

At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already "the end of men"—the phrase Rosin coined—has entered the lexicon as indelibly as Betty Friedan’s "feminine mystique," Simone de Beauvoir’s "second sex," Susan Faludi’s "backlash," and Naomi Wolf’s "beauty myth" have. ... Rosin reveals how the new world order came to be, and how it is dramatically shifting dynamics in every arena and at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more.

-- Sully's Dish

Yeah, well, I think most of the money and property and leadership positions are still held by men, not to mention more of the muscles and guns, so I don't think we need to write off men quite yet. Hell, in America, women are having a hard enough time holding on to the legal right to get an abortion and control their own reproductive health. No, baby, men aren't going anywhere. So, why don't you run your cute little butt to the refrigerator and get us another beer!

Kim Kardashian is thrilled to be the inspiration for Kanye West's new song, "Perfect Bitch" ... TMZ has learned.

Kim is telling friends, "I'm honored. I love it," adding, "I know he doesn't mean it in a negative way when he says the word 'bitch.'"

-- ONTD

Umm, okay! Actually, I kind of like it myself, but it is in the spirit of a dominant-submissive kind of sex-playing, right? It is not something to please the politically-correct feminist. It probably wouldn't please Naomi Wolf, for instance, but then Naomi doesn't have Kim's sweet ass.

Bikini waxing, "vajazzling" or jeweled decoration of the genitals, waxing, shaving and removal of pubic hair are all becoming increasingly popular among young people. But some doctors are opposing the "war against pubic hair" and are trying to highlight the possible dangers of these activities.

-- News/LJ

I have not heard of vajazzling before, but I take it that it means something like putting the jazz in your vagina, and if vajazzling is wrong, I don't want to be right. I suspect that this may be one of those militant feminist conspiracies, and it won't be long before they are pushing the idea that shaving your legs could cause polio and giving head is more dangerous than smoking.

“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition.”

-- Emily Gould

Heh, yes, it's funny how that works.

I did not know that India had a problem with acid attacks against women. I thought it was strictly a Muslim-Islamist horror.

_ _ _

Nine years ago, three men broke into Sonali’s home in the east Indian city of Dhanbad as she slept, and threw concentrated acid over her face. The highly corrosive chemical caused 70 percent burns to her face, neck and arms and melted away the skin and flesh on her nose, cheeks and ears – leaving her almost blind and partially deaf. Sonali, who was a 17-year-old college student at the time of the attack, had rejected their sexual advances for months and when she threatened to call the police, they took their revenge.

[...]

Acid attacks occur at high rates in Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia because the acid used to perpetrate attacks—such as sulfuric acid and nitric acid—is cheap and easily available. Neither India nor Cambodia has enacted laws to regulate the easy availability of acid or criminal laws to adequately punish perpetrators of attacks. On the other hand, Bangladesh enacted two laws in 2002—one that heightens criminal penalties and improves criminal procedures and another that attempts to decrease the availability of acid. Acid attacks are on the rise in India and Cambodia, but have decreased by 15% to 20% in Bangladesh each year after the country adopted specific laws to address acid violence.

-- Sully's Dish

[N]uance is felt as a threat by activists who cling to their depiction of rape as the ultimate horror. They seem to think that if it’s not the superlatively worst human experience, it will become acceptable or even more prevalent.

[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.

-- Charlotte Shane